Philip Roth died before he could win a Nobel Prize. He didn’t need it.

It’s just as well there will be no Nobel Prize in literature this year. Philip Roth is dead.

The Nobel judges passed over America’s most formidable novelist for decades even as he published one classic after another, from “Goodbye, Columbus” to “The Plot Against America.” As thundering obituaries have noted around the world, Roth won every other honor a writer could win, sometimes — in the case of the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award — two or three times.